This course is a study of the novel of manners over a century -- from 1813 to
1913 – in the fiction of Jane Austen, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. We
move from the heroine-centered courtship plots of Austen’s fiction, set in
Regency England, through Wharton and James’s adaptations of the genre in
the late nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth
century. We will read Veblen’s classic economic study of the leisure class as
the lens through which we will interpret Wharton’s novels, many of them set
in America’s Gilded Age, the era of conspicuous consumption. The novels in
this course, largely traditional in structure, focus on the implications of the
assumption Lawrence Selden makes in The House of Mirth: that marriage is
the heroine’s vocation. This course has these principal goals: to introduce
students to the conventions of the genre; to consider the ways in which
novelists revise their own work over their careers and respond in complex ways to the influence exerted on them by their precursors and
contemporaries; to consider the evolution of the novel of manners over time
and across national boundaries. This is a course, then, in authorial selfrevision,
in literary influence, and in the study of an important novelistic
genre.

Description:

This syllabus was submitted to the Office of Academic Affairs by the course instructor.